Showing posts with label Abramović. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Abramović. Show all posts
Summative Statement
The most difficult thing about researching and digging into Marina Abramović was that it felt like she was the only one saying the things she was saying. She opened up so many questions in me, but it seemed like no one else asked these same questions or felt the urge to come up with answers. How exactly do you phrase a question around the idea that “perhaps curiosity can trigger aggression through the desperation of the need for validation” without having to delve into a long explanation of how the question came to be and what the value of the answers might be? How do I describe the connection I felt between John Cage’s 4’33” and her The Artist is Present? On my blog, I labeled both pieces with #the power/beauty/value of silence, but even the word, “silence,” can have too many depths and colors. When John Cage talked about there not being such a thing as silence, was he asking us to evaluate the same thing that Abramović evaluated as she sat across from so many strangers without speaking?
The things that strike me as most impressive, or effective, about Abramović is her ability to speak to me without using what I have thus far considered the most effective channels of communication. The most powerful part of AAA-AAA was not Abramović or Ulay, it was the presence of two humans, it was the two humans so close together, it was the space between them, the force between them, the noises they were independently making, and the noises they made when their individual noises mingled. I’ve never seen anything like that before that video—something that really made me forget what I was looking at and listening to and contemplate solely what I was perceiving of these things. I have seen paintings that I think are achingly beautiful (Vrubel’s The Demon), paintings that represent everything I detest but are immeasurably beautiful (Vasnetsov’s Threshold of Paradise), but until I looked at Abramović’s works, I have never seen things that I thought were truly ugly looking but internalized them thoroughly anyway.
Now, the most interesting thing about Abramović is that she’s not so cruel as to only cause questions. She shows evidence. Evidence is not answers, and it is the very thing that causes questions in her art, but evidence is how we, as human beings, learn, discover, and cast off previous notions that weren’t supported by evidence but rather our own perceptions and assumptions. Her art is in the hypotheses she forms. The ability of her art to go horribly wrong or surprise her proves that she makes hypotheses rather than statements or expressions. The results of her performance are the same as the results of a scientific experiment, as it matters little whether or not the script was followed on not or if the hypothesis proved or disproved. What matters is that the result was observed and recorded, so that it could teach us something and pave the way for future exploration.
The lateral part of my research barely felt like an assignment, but was rather felt more like just a focused attempt to pay attention to behaviors and influences we do see in our daily lives, or see evidence of, and really take some time out to explore them. I made connections through the organization of my blog to suddenly start pondering what could be considered an altered state of consciousness. I am now certain that Abramović enters one in her performances, the only thing I’ll never get a chance to find out is whether it’s on purpose to shield herself, on purpose to be more accepting of change, subconsciously to protect herself, before the performance, during the performance, or any combination of multiple causes at multiple times. What states are most beneficial to us or perhaps most educational probably differs on a case by case basis, and I find it incredible to have explored this idea looking at performances instead of reading it in a textbook.
It’s interesting to see what I think is proof that we are not just brains being carried around by our bodies from one mental stimulus to another. Here is an artist, with an incredible amount of control over her mind and body, who can sit through pain, sit through emotion, can enter so many states of consciousness, but even she is governed by her world and environment. Abramović has a reason for doing her experiences in the real world rather than in just her mind and privately reflecting, aside from being an artist and therefore having a need to show others her transformations. The blazing petrol, the rose thorns, the act of yelling, the act of whipping herself, the situation of being yelled at, even the state of performing itself is what triggers her mind to flip an internal switch. Without these physical stimuli of interacting with her environment, she would not be stating today that her performances have changed her and continue to do so. It gives me pause and inspires me to consider the stimuli that change me, both for the long haul because they have touched me in a way that will never be forgotten, and in the briefest of moments when my entire mind starts to work differently because of a ritual I may have picked up, a natural defense of my brain, or a curiosity that might make me an entirely different person until it subsides.
Ayako Kato on Marina Abramović
"Marina Abramović’s work demands extreme endurance for both herself and her audience members through the often long durational nature of her works. As seen in this reenactment of her work Seven Easy Pieces (2005), seven hours is a familiar duration for Abramović due to the normal opening hours for galleries and museums. Abramović states that audiences may not see the performance starting and ending. Other works, Relation is Movement (1977) and one of twenty-two Nightsea Crossing performances (1981 – 87), lasted 16 hours. Great Wall Walk (1988) took 90 days when Abramović and Ulay, her collaborator since 1976, walked from eastern and western opposite ends of the wall until they met and actually finished their partnership in reality.
[...]
Pain, endurance and self-flagellation are notably seen in Lips of Thomas (1975) which is included in Seven Easy Pieces, by her eating a kilogram of honey, drinking a liter of red wine, and then incising a pentagram in her stomach with broken glass. Loop and repetition often add significance in her works. In Lips and Thomas, she violently whips herself until she no longer feels any pain (Abramović 196). She explores the physical and mental limitations of the body. The elements of ancient mythology, ritual, and religion can be seen as pentagram in Lips of Thomas, and the symbol recalls The Vitruvian Manby Leonard da Vinci.
For her later work Biesenbach states, “Through the series of autobiographical works, Abramović has come to terms with her cultural, ideological, and spiritual origins in the Balkans, her family background, and the guilt and shame she felt over the genocidal atrocities in Serbia in the 1990s” (Biesenbach16). With the act of self-purification, she scrubbed skeleton in Cleaning the Mirror #1. In Balkan Baroque (1997), she sat for six hours a day for four hours to scrub, brush and scrape the meat off 6,000 pounds of blood-stained cow bones surrounded by three-channel projection of life-size images of Abramović and her parents.
Through the nude, Abramović presents herself in her art as a self-portrait, and it “manifests individuals in their most basic, reduced, pure, vulnerable state, their most equal state in relation to the rest of the world” (Biesenbach 18). With a human skeleton, she goes even further to reveal “bare bones.”
The statement below shows Abramović’s recent reflection upon duration:
I would like somehow to find a system so the performance would become life. That it actually becomes just timeless. I don’t want an audience to spend time with me looking at my work; I want them to be with me and forget about time. Open up the space and just that moment of here and now, of nothing, there is no future and there is no past. In that way, you can extend eternity. It is about being present. (Abramović 211)
Through all the essence together with the extensive duration and emergence of vulnerable, yet empowered state, Abramović’s performances reveal the different, but similar historical and personal human events in common and create reverberation in viewers’ memories and experiences through the feeling of eternity."
Context on Abramović
Abramović's background as written by Mary Richards in her book Marina Abramović:
A Crash Course on Abramović
Abramović is a performance artist
that’s been around for long enough to call herself the “grandmother of
performance art.” When she first started out, her performances were a form of
denouncement of the culture she grew up in, but she stuck with her chosen art
form, and her work evolved to contain much more meaning than simple rebellion. Driven
by her search for spiritual and psychological enlightenment, to find the
connection and difference between the body and the mind, she has pushed her
performances so far that she admits to being changed by them.
One of Abramović’s most well-known
pieces is Rhythm 0. It was a
performance piece performed in front of an audience, rather than recorded and
displayed later, in which the audience was an active participant in the
performance. Marina Abramović remained still and passive for 6 hours while the
audience was invited to act upon her using any of the 72 objects that were laid
out nearby—some harmless, some lethal. The audience started off interacting
with Abramović timidly, but in time progressed to aggression, leaving the
artist in pain and feeling violated.
This is likely one of the most
powerful pieces I've ever heard of. It fascinates me, and yet scares me so much
that I do not think that I would have wanted to be present during the
performance. There’s so much it says about human nature, about the curiosity
aspect of it. First, that a human would willingly endure such violation and
humiliation for the sake of art is astounding. There was no concrete benefit to
Abramović toughing it out: she was not tangibly rewarded for it, she did not do
it to save her life, or to save anyone else’s life. She did it solely to push
boundaries in order to satisfy her curiosity and make a statement. Then there’s
the behavior of the audience to discuss—the curiosity that would cause them to
begin to interact with her—a brazen, impassive, and foreboding figure—to begin
with. The curiosity that would cause them to go to extremes to provoke her—to
toe the boundary much the same way she was, but with potentially much more
harmful results. The most powerful thing about this piece is that it brings up
questions. Did the audience feel free to harm her because they dehumanized her in their minds due to her not fighting back? Or did they harm her because of a childish anger
in response to her dehumanizing herself—out of frustration with not getting any
validation or feedback from her?
Another impactful piece was her
collaboration with Ulay to make “AAA-AAA”, a performance piece in which the two
of them speak “Aaa-” at each other for as long as they can until they need to
take in more air. They progressively get louder and closer to each other, until
they are yelling and screaming the same sound into each other’s mouths. Watching
that single video is more exhausting than running around museums all day. It
might not make your legs ache, but for anyone that is sucked into empathizing
with all of the emotions and subtleties and displays of dominance in the video,
it’s emotionally draining. It’s a video that speaks of things that probably
should be in psychology textbooks, but isn’t. That scientific aspect, that
experimentation, melded together with all the emotions it produces, is what
makes it so incredible.
Interview “Marina Abramović” by Karlyn De Jong and Sarah
Gold accessed through the Art Full Text database.
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